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Conflicademia arcade mode & Windows Phone 8.1

Aloha ‘oe!

So I’ve made a few updates to the arcade mode shooter. There have been a number of delays as the progress isn’t substantially great. I’ve written new movement path logic for the enemies to come down the screen. I’ve created about 35 seconds worth of level 1 following the patterns of some old school shooters.

Dumb drones that fly down from the right, then left, the right again. You get the gist. I’ve also altered the enemy test factory to generate larger enemies with more health. Feel free to head on to the Conflicademia page and give it a whirl. To attack, don’t forget to perform a swipe up-ish motion with the mouse by clicking and dragging in an upward motion.

So other than the game, I recently purchased a Nokia Lumia 925 Windows Phone that was on sale on Newegg for $200. Directly from T-Mobile it’s $408 so I thought it was a good deal and after watching the numerous webcasts from Microsoft Build 2014, I thought it would be nice to test the platform out.

To sum up my experiences, 8.0 does not hold itself well against Android. However with the 8.1 developer preview update, my Galaxy Note 3 has literally sat on my desk doing nothing. I’m currently dual wielding the devices, just in case there is some missing feature that I need. However, I’m actually starting to grow fond of this little device.

So even though 8.1 does enough to hold it’s own for me, your average bear, who is still running 8.0 probably is agonizing until the official launch. Microsoft really needs to hurry!

In 8.0 there are a number of annoyances that would have prevented me from actively using it outside of experimentation, but the update handled most of the items. There are still a few things that would prevent me from choosing it as my primary phone platform.

Maps

Inaccuracy – I had to stop by and run an errand on “21 West St”, in which Google maps perfectly discovered the location. Unfortunately, Bing/Here either selected the wrong city and sometimes couldn’t even find it with the city

No mass transit (using subways) directions in the stock maps app

Humorously when you update to 8.1 and as you launch maps it even recommends an app GMap+, which loads it’s data from Google maps.

Google Hangouts Client – This is actually my own fault. When Google introduced the idea of using hangouts as your sms client, it was great, but then it blended the lines between using gchat or sms. So when someone sent me a message on gchat, I no longer got it on this phone.

Browser incognito mode – Because, when I e-stalk you, I don’t want that record on my phone

If any of you have a Windows Phone and solutions or work arounds, I’m all ears.